


Speak As Well as Spy

by MercuryGray



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Absence, Absent Spouses, Closure, Extramarital Affairs, F/M, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 18:26:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11492112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: "Philadelphia suits you."  His wife speaks as she finds, and Selah Strong is unnerved by it. Philadelphia has suited him, and he is ashamed to tell her why.





	Speak As Well as Spy

_‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?_  
_O wilt thou therefore rise from me?_  
_Why should we rise because ‘tis light?_  
_Did we lie down because ‘twas night?_  
_Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,_  
_Should in despite of light keep us together._

 _Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;_  
_**If it could speak as well as spy,** _  
_**This were the worst that it could say,** _  
_That being well I fain would stay,_  
_And that I loved my heart and honour so,_  
_That I would not from him, that had them, go._

  
_-John Donne, Break of Day_

 

* * *

 

 

At New Windsor, greeting him, his wife looks him over with a frightened eye and says, haltingly, "Philadelphia agrees with you."

For a moment, Selah wishes it were not true.

Is it really five years since he's seen his wife? Somehow it seems longer, and shorter, at the same turn. But perhaps that is only the memory of it, in places clearly linieated, in others vague and out of joint. After she left him in Setauket, there is only a wash of army life, the blank spaces in his life where she should have been out in sharp relief. (All the men were without thier wives, but somehow Anna seemed more absent to him. At night, in his dreams, he saw her swimming away from the boat towards the shore, never looking back at him.)

Soldiering is not for him; he's taken no bounty, signed no enlistment papers. He thinks about it, shortly after joining up with the Army, but it does not feel right, like a coat too tight at the shoulders. Mention is made of how the Congress needs a delegate for New York, and his name is mentioned - a man of business, of strong principles, able to barter and compromise, with a solid head on his shoulders. A vote is taken, and he heads to Philidelphia, with little more than a spare suit of clothes. What a scarecrow figure he cuts in Congress, displaying his credentials to Mr. Hancock! His cloth was fine enough for Setauket society, but these, truely, are men of influence and rank - Mr. Hancock's waistcoat, for instance, is china silk, beautifully made. "Where are you staying?" The president of the Congress asks, handing back his papers. Selah makes some vague reply about an inn nearby. "You'll want a room - a private home is better, and...usually less expensive." He knows Hancock doesn't mean anything by the implication, and asks where he lodges. Nothing going there - but there is a neighbor, down the street, who rents rooms. Widow, with a child - a patriot of good character, her husband recently dead on campaign. Perhaps she might be able to oblidge? A white house with a green door - the name is Temple.

The house is a small one, but the windows are clean and the street in front well-swept. Selah thinks wistfully of the tavern in Setauket, and wonders if Anna has managed to keep it or if he has forfeited his right to his property as well as his wife. He shuffles his bag awkwardly as he knocks on the door and waits, running through what he will say to explain his situation and the recommendation of Mr. Hancock. And then the door opens.

He was not expecting her to be so young.

Widow always seemed to Selah to mean a woman of forty, but the Widow Temple is hardly older than his Anna, though her cap and kerchief are tied and tucked in a way that makes her look older. He shows his papers, makes vague mention of the rent and his pay as a member of Congress, and she nods, shows him inside, apologizing for the blocks on the floor of her sitting room and the wooden horse he nearly trips over going up the stairs. A small body darts from one of the rooms into his mother's skirts, sheltering in the swale of her petticoats while she tries to introduce Selah. "Will you not say hello, Charlie?" she urges patiently.

Selah folds himself down to the child's level, aware his height may not help him here. "How d'you do, Charlie?" he asks, holding out a hand for the child to shake, as if he's an adult. Charlie looks at it with vague distrust, but shakes anyway. His fingers are impossibly warm and faintly sticky - but his mother's eyes are approving.

There is a rhythm to his days in Philedelphia, a quiet predictability he has not had since leaving Setauket - or maybe before, even. The arrival of the regulars upended many things. He rises early and takes a dish of coffee before joining the day's sessions. Lunch comes from a nearby tavern, brought in, eaten and served around the ebb and flow of the day's debates. When yet another impasse is reached, business is adjourned for the day and the Congress disperses, to coffeehouses and the City Tavern, and Selah goes home to the little house on Arch Street.

None of Mrs. Temple's other lodgers spend quite so much time here; traveling on business, many of them are all too eager to escape the pressures of home and spend their free time over a cup of ale in the tavern down the street. But Selah has seen enough of taverns and drunks, and the idea of spending an evening arguing over the point they've debated all day holds little appeal. He'd rather sit in the front room, reading near the fire or watching Charlie play with his blocks. If there are arguments to be had, he'd rather they were over when the little boy can go to bed.

"Did you have any children?" Mrs. Temple asks as she catches him helping her son build a taller tower on the hearth rug. She knows there was a wife, back in New York, but Selah does not speak of her much, and then only in the past tense, as though she were dead. Anna belongs to an earlier time - and Selah wonders, sometimes, if she still belongs to him at all, if it would not be better if she were dead to him, and he to her.

He smiles, shakes his head. "We were not so blessed." Perhaps if I had stayed, he wonders. But it is his lap that Charlie crawls to after dinner, his feet at which he plays, and Selah finds he does not mind at all. Summer gives way to autumn, autumn to winter. He fixes a chair when the back breaks, helps hang new pegs in the kitchen for pots and pans. It becomes common for her to ask him to retreive objects from tall shelves. As they pass in the hallway thier bodies brush, awkwardly exchanging apologies. He has been there six months when he finally hears her first name, dropped from the lips of a visiting freind - Rosamund. (This is the name he uses for her in his mind, now; it suits her far better than Widow Temple.)

One night Charlie falls asleep on the rug, worn out from an earlier trip to the park, and Selah, quite without thinking, carries him upstairs, nearly running into the boy's mother on the landing. Her face moves from surprise to quiet pleasure, watching as Selah opens the door to the boy's room with one hand, calmly holding the sleeping child to his shoulder with the other. She meets him outside as he closes the door behind him, her face a mixture of emotions, and they do not speak except in gestures, when she lays a hand on his chest and meets his eyes in invitation, and he, tenative, takes her hand in both of his own and kisses it.

They cannot help the little noises the bed makes, or thier own groans and sighs. As many times as Selah has done this, he cannot help but find it different, and wonders if it is the woman or the illicit nature of the act that gives it spice, trying to contain thier multitudes, desperate not to wake her other lodgers. How content she looks, when he finishes! He whispers in her ear, Rose, Rose, Rose, worshipping her with her name, and she whispers back Oh, Selah like it is a scrap of silk she has been saving. It is warm and close between them, and he, too, is content.

He sleeps there only a little while, taking his clothes and removing to his own bedroom before the sun comes up and anyone else in the house is awake to ask awkward questions. Someone remarks on his mood later in the day, offhandedly mentioning that he looks happier. That night at dinner her wrist finds a way to brush past his shoulder, her foot a reason to trace his ankle. After Charlie is in bed they rearrange themselves again into her bed.

It becomes a kind of restrained domesticity, a marriage that is not really a marriage. While the other congressmen go home for harvest, Selah remains in Philidelphia, unsure what home he has left to return to when everything that feels like home is here. While the bed warms around thier cold feet in December she tells him of her dead husband, of how she felt when Charlie was born, how she cried when the news that she was now a widow came, how she watched her son take his first steps and how lonesome she had been.

There are many more months of this before Anna's letter arrives.

Rosamund knows nothing of its contents when she leaves it on the table in his room - reading it, Selah's skin crawls with guilt realizing that her hands have been where Anna's were.

She is alive. She is with the army, and by that token closer now to him than she has been for the entire war. "It has been too long, and there is so much I must tell you."

This is where Rosamund finds him after he does not answer her call for dinner, still in his chair, the letter loose in his hand. "Bad news?" she asks, one hand on his shoulder. He cannot lie. The story unspools from him like yarn from a wheel, drawn out piece by painful piece. Setauket, the business with Captain Joyce, the prison ship, his release, the return to Long Island and his wife's abrupt abandonment. Not dead, as she sees. Not even close.

How little she must think of him, he adds sadly. A married man, leading her a merry dance while his wife is where she is.

For a while there is only silence. "You must go to her," Rosamund says, and her voice is distant. Thunder rumbles through the city, and Charlie, afraid of the storm, begs to sleep in his mother's bed that night. His presence affects a neater separation than words could have managed. The next day Selah applies to Congress for a leave to go visit the camp.

His thoughts are disordered throughout the whole carriage ride to New Windsor, grateful, on his arrival, for Benjamin Tallmadge and the opportunity to smile and play the gracious guest, the letter in his pocket like a talisman.

But then there is - oh, there is Anna, his Anna, as dark and lovely as the day he left her - or she him, whichever version of the story he tells himself, saying that Philidelphia agrees with him and refusing to meet his eye. They are strangers to each other now, and he wonders, in between their halting words, if he ever really knew the woman he married. She has changed - but then, so has he. He knows now he cannot demand affection, that it is one thing to obey and another to love, that you cannot put a life back together as you do a broken plate. He has been helping Rosamund teach Charlie his alphabet, and he also knows, intimately now, that love and duty share no letters. In the quiet of her chamber Rosamund told him of her losses, what it felt like when her husband left and would not ask for her advice, how burdensome her love was when she felt it was not returned in equal measure.

He screws his courage up to tell her the truth. "You are important to me, though that...doesn't interest me as much as it used to. What does interest me is...what is important to you."

She looks at him as though she might weep for joy, and he realizes that, regardless of what her answer is, another woman's approval is all he wants.

**Author's Note:**

> Must business thee from hence remove?  
> Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,  
> The poor, the foul, the false, love can  
> Admit, but not the busied man.  
> He which hath business, and makes love, doth do  
> Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo. 
> 
> Selah and Anna's scenes in 4.5 were just so tender and heart-breaking, and it was really lovely to see them back together again that I had to do something with an idea that's been kicking around my head for a while - namely that while Anna was off doing a bit of discovery about herself and her values with Hewlett (to whatever end you read that going) Selah was doing the same thing where he was. The man who visits New Windsor is totally different from the one we saw in Season One - he asks for Anna's opinion, explains that he values her advice. He even seems prepared to take 'No' as a legitimate answer to his question of whether she'd like to join him, or even whether he can write her letters. Where did that come from? One theory is above.
> 
> My apologies for any historical inaccuracy regarding the Congressional tenure in Philadelphia and lodging/daily business during the same - my resources while I wrote this this morning were thin.


End file.
